Frozen

Frozen is a bad movie. Abysmal dialog, painfully contrived plot twists and unconvincing acting are just some of the major clangers that suggest that the creative forces behind the film had their own brains lodged in the deep freeze compartment of their local Iceland next to Kerry Katona's prawn rings. Yet despite all the flaws, Frozen is curiously watchable. The unintentional laughs are bountiful and there’s surely a liver-battering drinking game to be derived from it.

The premise of Frozen is actually very strong. Three thrill-seeking youngsters are stranded on a ski lift late at night, dangling high above the ground as a storm moves nearer. Through some freakish circumstances, the workers on the resort are oblivious to their presence and the trio soon realize that they will freeze to death unless they take desperate measures.

It all sounds bloody great on paper, kind of like Open Water on the piste. However, you'll notice above that the central characters are only referred to as a threesome. That’s because they are so ill-defined and poorly portrayed that their meagre personas do not merit more than a brief mention. There’s a distressed girl who wets herself, her arrogant boyfriend and one nerdish mate who refers to himself as ‘the spare wheel’ - seemingly oblivious to the fact that a rubber wheel would outrank them all in terms of personality. Therein lies the problem. The movie desperately wants you to care for their plight and crave their survival, but the reality is that they are simply pieces of flesh whose continued presence is an obstacle to the end credits rolling. A highly intrusive music score, which seeks to tug at the heartstrings, also aggravates the senses.

The amount of preposterous coincidences that lead to the precarious predicament of the three muppets and their continued suffering also robs Frozen of any remote credibility. These types of movies benefit hugely if the audience believes that what they are witnessing could actually happen to some poor unlucky souls. However, certain scenes are reminiscent of the old Road Runner cartoons. Remember when Wile E Coyote used to fall off a cliff and land in a puff of smoke, only to miraculously survive and be subsequently squashed by an anvil? Well, such a cartoonish scenario seems real in comparison to several sequences in this, as it revolves around doomed attempts to escape from the ski lift. On the subject of coyotes, the pack of wolves that congregate below the trio are absolutely hilarious - for reasons that cannot be described without getting too spoilerish about the plot.

Adam Green’s direction is also less than commendable, failing to tap into the vertigo-inducing possibilities of the situation to make the audience squirm with discomfort. Instead, more effort is spent on misplaced moments of body horror, with the camera dwelling on bits of flesh falling off due to frostbite and sticking to the icy safety bar on the ski lift. It’s just a shame that none of the characters tried to lick the bar, true Dumb And Dumber-style, although given the incredulity present in the movie one can assume that that was filmed but left on the cutting room floor next to a dismembered prosthetic tongue.